A System Divided
3,295 Students, 40 Black
This is the first in an occasional series of articles examining the changing racial distribution of students in New York City’s public schools and its impact on their opportunities and achievements.
Prince – Purple Rain Live 1983
at the First Avenue nightclub
in Minneapolis
on August 3, 1983
– this is the ORIGINAL
that went on the Album
i found this yesterday night via Reddit via Redditor Captain Psyko (you made my day!) and was blown away. I am listening to this for the (must be) 1oth time or so at a video length of 13+ min! I have to share this with all of you. since this is the exact original live recording of purple rain, that made it on the album (in a shortened version), i didnt even know it was live. Pls read these comments. Excuse my (copy & paste) french :) Prince is/was/will be a genius in my book in all eternity.
From the YouTube comments:
In case you all don’t know this IS the original live recording of the ALBUM VERSION. This is not some random live recording. This exact recording is what you hear on Purple Rain sans the 2nd chorus and 3rd verse which he took out. There are also some string quartet overdubs and edits to the guitar solo. But the vocal track is the exact track on the album. Love it. One take. LIVE.
And, from Wikipedia comes confirmation:
The song was recorded during a benefit concert for the Minnesota Dance Theatre at the First Avenue nightclub in Minneapolis on August 3, 1983. The performance was guitarist Wendy Melvoin’s live debut with The Revolution, at age nineteen. City Pages described the 70-minute performance as Prince’s “sweatiest and most soulful hometown concert yet”, and drummer Bobby Z stated, “it certainly was one of the best concerts we ever did”.[2] The concert was recorded by David Rivkin using a mobile recording unit brought in from the Record Plant in New York City, staffed by engineers Dave Hewitt and Kooster McAllister.[3] The basic tracks for three songs were used on the Purple Rain soundtrack: “Purple Rain”, “I Would Die 4 U”, and “Baby I’m a Star”. Prince performed overdubs and re-recorded the vocals while working at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles from August–September 1983. A solo and verse from the original recording were edited out, changing the length from eleven to eight minutes.[2] The extra verse was about money, but was removed because it diluted the emotional impact of the song.[citation needed]
Holy. Shit.
via chromemusic.de
Annual Writing Contest Submissions Open as of January 1, 2012
We are accepting submissions for the 2012 TIFERET Writing Contest from January 1, 2012 — June 1, 2012.
$1,200 will be awarded in prizes
$400 for the best poetry submission
$400 for the best short story
$400 for the best essay or interviewTIFERET publishes fiction, nonfiction, poetry, interviews, and art. We look for high-quality creative work that expresses spiritual experiences and/or promotes tolerance. Our mission is to help raise individual and global consciousness, and we publish writing from a variety of religious and spiritual traditions.
We strongly urge you to read an issue of Tiferet to increase your chance of acceptance. Order a print issue here or an online issue here. http://tiferetjournal.com/submit/
Tiferet editors are also now offering manuscript evaluations for a reasonable rate. Email the editors (editors [at] tiferetjournal [dot] com) for more details.
Fiction: We interpret the word “spiritual” broadly. First, we seek well-written stories, pure and simple, that engage us in some small pocket of humanity. The first page will tell us if the writer has a command of story, of character drive, of description, of language & syntax & voice. Or not. And we’re fans of imagination in fiction, so let yours emerge in the stories you send us. We’re not necessarily interested in religious-oriented stories, nor are we interested in sermons disguised as stories or as stories with overt religious “messages.”
Nonfiction: We like to publish essays and interviews that shed light on personal experiences of grappling with the invisible… or different aspects of spiritual traditions. Our readers like to learn about different cultures and a writer’s unique journey. Clear, concise writing with good concrete visual detail is required.
Poetry: Tiferet receives a huge volume of poetry submissions, of which only a small percentage are accepted. We look for the highest quality poems that display mastery of content and craft. Technical proficiency is extremely important, along with clear expression of various aspects of the human spirit. We do not accept poetry that is self-consciously “religious.” We publish poems with striking imagery and strong sonic impression, and we look for engaging voices that do more than simply tell a story or display intellectual cleverness. Emily Dickinson wrote, “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” This is how the poems we publish make us feel! Send only your very best work.
Art and Photography: We seek original art and photography which in some way captures the spiritual or contemplative in a visual representation. You must own the copyright to your work. If it has appeared elsewhere we require permission from the original publisher for us to reproduce it. Please submit your work as a jpg Image or OmniPage Image no smaller than 640x840 pixels and no larger than 2400x1600.
We accept online submissions only. Hard copy submissions made through snail mail will not be considered or returned.
Please submit one story, one essay, one interview, or six poems at a time. Poems should be submitted in one document with each poem on a separate page and each page/poem titled. All submissions must be made in Word or in a Text Document.
We acquire first-time North American rights in print and digital format; non-exclusive, one-time anthology rights; and the right to run the story, essay, interview, poem or art on our website, Facebook page, or through a Twitter link. After publication all other rights revert to the author and the work may be reprinted as long as appropriate acknowledgment is made to TIFERET.
Authors proof their work before print publication and will receive one complimentary copy of the print issue in which their work appears.We look forward to reading your work!
Contest - Poetry - $20.00
- Unpublished submissions in English must be received through our online submissions manager by June 1, 2012- First prize in each genre: $400 and publication in TIFERET.
- Honorable Mention Prizes will receive publication in a TIFERET digital issue.
- $20 fee for each entry. Limit 6 (six) per genre. No more than 6 poems per submission. Up to six poems can be submitted for one entry fee. All poems must be submitted in one document with each poem on a separate page and each page/poem titled.
- Winners will be announced September 1, 2012
Contest - Fiction (Story) - $20.00
- Unpublished submissions in English must be received through our online submissions manager by June 1, 2012- First prize in each genre: $400 and publication in TIFERET.
- Honorable Mention Prizes will receive publication in a TIFERET digital issue
-$20 fee for each entry. Not to exceed 20 pages.
- Winners will be announced September 1, 2012
Contest - Nonfiction (Essay / Interview) - $20.00
- Unpublished submissions in English must be received through our online submissions manager by June 1, 2012- First prize in each genre: $400 and publication in TIFERET.
- Honorable Mention Prizes will receive publication in a TIFERET digital issue.
- $20 fee for each entry. Not to exceed 20 pages.
- Winners will be announced September 1, 2012
The 31st Annual Meeting of the
West Indian Literature Conference
The 31st Annual Meeting of the West Indian Literature Conference, hosted by the Caribbean Literary Studies Program of the University of Miami at Coral Gables will be held on October 11-13, 2012. The main theme is “Imagined Nations, 50 Years Later: Reflections on Independence and Federation in the Caribbean.” The organizers have extended the deadline for submissions to April 15, 2012.
Description: In 2012 Trinidad and Tobago and Jamaica will celebrate the 50th Anniversary of their independence from Britain. However, while 2012 marks these very auspicious occasions, it is also the 50th anniversary of the collapse of the West Indies Federation. Anniversaries encourage and even demand reflection and re-visitations of the expectations, opportunities lost, and those well used, the failures and achievements as well as the considerations that attended these occasions. For more than fifty years, novelists, poets, visual artists and other cultural workers have been actively involved in imagining, revising and challenging the project of independence and the future it promised for so many. The 50th Anniversary is an excellent opportunity to revisit the movement towards and attainment of independence; the arts movements that emerged out of these nationalist projects; the cultural institutions that gave expression to the changes taking place; the rise and collapse of the West Indian Federation and the implications of all of these developments for the Caribbean region in the new era of globalization. Moreover, this occasion provides an important critical crossroad for us to consider the extent to which dialogues about independence and Federation have preoccupied not only writers, but also artists working in a number of different mediums in the Caribbean region. To this end, the University of Miami has proposed that the 31st West Indian Literature Conference invites writers, cultural practitioners and scholars to submit papers that engage a wide range of critical perspectives on the various representations of both independence and the rise and fall of the West Indian Federation.
The organizers welcome abstracts of 250-500 words in length. Abstracts should include name, academic affiliation and contact information, and should be sent to westindianlitconf2012@gmail.com
For more information, see http://www.as.miami.edu/cls/conferences.html and previous post Call for Papers: The 31st West Indian Literature Conference
Illustration from http://www.ulib.niu.edu/rarebooks/westindiesmaps.cfm
2012 SISTARS Essay and Poetry Competition (on Black/ African Women - US)
Deadline: 31 March 2012The National Office of the Original Million Woman March announced today its first Million Woman Movement, MWM Lil' Sistahs: "SISTARS" Essay and Poetry Competition 2012
For Girls of African Descent Ages 7-17
Topics: Black/African Women:of Antiquity, Modern (Recent), and Present (Today) Day
Black/African People and the Quest for Freedom and Justice in North America (the USA in particular)Maximum Length of Submission: 500 words
The MWM Lil' Sistahs: "SISTARS" Essay and Poetry Contest will not only provide greater awareness of the great contributions, achievements, beauty and creativity of females of African descent from antiquity, recent, and present day history but it will also nurture and stabilizeself-esteem, self- respect and family/community/nation building. in addition to the positive competitiveness and comradery/Sistahood development, literacy enrichment, and greater appreciation for the Arts,
Entries must be typed and received (posted dated) no later than March 31, 2012. Winners will be notified by June 31, 2012
Selected participants will have the opportunity to travel to Africa and/or to the Caribbean as a part of the MWM 2012-2013,
Original Universal Sistars Delegates, be featured at the MWM 16th Reunion anniversary celebration, receive school supplies, and more.
To obtain a Lil' "SISTARS" Essay & Poetry Contest Registration Form or for more information forward your request via e-mail to:nationalmwm@aol.com or call: 267-636-3802
Persons who may be interested in being a part of the MWM Scribes/Literary Committee (Review Team) should contact the National MWM Headquarters:. at nationalmwm@aol.com
CONTACT INFORMATION:
For inquiries: nationalmwm@aol.com or call: 267-636-3802
Sundance 2012 Review
- "1/2 Revolution"
(A Gripping Documentation
Of The Egyptian Revolution)
Reviews by Tambay | January 21, 2012
An immediate, visceral, first-person documentation of just a few days of a still ongoing struggle, one year after that first day, January 25, 2011 (also referred to as the "Day of Revolt"), when protests erupted throughout Egypt, with tens of thousands gathered in multiple cities all over the country, targeting the then autocratic governance of President Hosni Mubarak (30 years in the making) - the poverty, unemployment, and government corruption.
Armed with consumer cameras, a close-knit group of friends risk death to capture the historic waves of non-violent protests, met with an equally determined and violent response from the government and armed forces, further intensifying the danger of the circumstances that would eventually envelope them in their neighborhood near Tahrir Square during the early chaotic days of what has now come to be called the Egyptian revolution.
The viewer is practically thrown into the uprising from the first frame to the last. You're right there with them, every step of the way (the tear gas, the batons, then the bullets) and are thus privy to events that you wouldn't have seen in the mainstream media - bodies, battered and bloodied, lifeless, being dragged across concrete pavement by fellow protesters, bullets lodged in flesh, the impassioned screams for change, voices angry and resolute, willing to die for a cause.
It's 72 minutes of relentless struggle and this viewer found it exhausting, as it should be. It suggests that the filmmakers accomplished what they set out to do with the film - not just paint a picture for the audience to view and analyze from a distance; we are thrown into the chaos, in the streets with them, as their struggle becomes ours as well; we're invested and want to see them (or rather us) succeed.
And succeed they do, at least with forcing Mubarak to eventually step down under pressure, but only to be replaced with military junta rule, which is still in place a year later, hence the title of the film; meaning, the revolution hasn't ended.
A luta continua as the saying goes.
No pomp and circumstance, no flash and dash, just raw footage of a few days of a historic moment in time, cut into a 72 minute rush.
A few moments of calm scattered about, usually filled with impassioned discourse about the events taking place, in real time, in the streets - the gunshots, the screams, the explosions just an ear-shot away; but it's mostly storm.
It's not really a film that I'd grade as either *good* or *bad*; it just is. And your appreciation for it will depend on your interest in and understanding of the real events the film documents; so a little backstory would help.
In fact, if I were to point out one of the film's *weaknesses* it would be that it doesn't give the audience enough information on what inspired this new revolution. There are exclamations here and there cursing Mubarak's 30-year rule, but a basic (at least) awareness of the country's recent history would be helpful here.
I couldn't help but think of another movie about a revolution - Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle Of Algiers - the 1966 film on Algeria's struggles for independence from under French rule; a film and a revolution that went on to inspire others (films and revolutions), just as I think 1/2 Revolution (directed by Omar Shargawi and Karim El Hakim) has the authenticity and power to do as well.
Trailer follows below:
<br />Created by Online Education
Created by Online Education
The US is ranked #1 in some impressive areas but being #1 for incarceration isn’t something to brag about. In fact, more than 1 in every 100 adults in America are incarcerated at any given time. In some states such as Louisiana as many as 1 in 55 adults are incarcerated at any time. But even in states with fewer incarcerations like Maine, 1 in 226 are still incarcerated. In light of such numbers it isn’t surprising that the US has 25% of the world’s incarcerated population even though the US only makes up around 5% of the population globally.
Despite the huge population of incarcerated people it is far from a representative portion of the population. While the national average is 1 in 100, only 1 in 106 is a white male. Shockingly, 1 in 15 Black men are incarcerated. This is like 2 people out of every classroom. Comparatively 1 in 36 Hispanic men are incarcerated fully 300% more than their white counterparts.
The actual breakdown tells more of the story. Even though more Black and Hispanic men are incarcerated total they don’t actually dominate the prison population. Whites make a large percentage of people in prison making up 34.72% of the population, and Hispanics make up 18.26%. Unsurprisingly Blacks still make up the largest one ethnicity at 43.91% of the population of incarcerated persons. With only 3.11% combined for other ethnicities. In total we have 2.3 million people in prison in the US which is roughly 10% of our population.
To give some weight to these numbers if we compare this to the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, we have some 435 times that number incarcerated right now. Obviously we have a problem especially since 51.8% of those incarcerated who are released wind up right back in prison within 3 years, even though the average prison sentence is only 5 years. While these numbers represent people and we should remember that, there are also some very real monetary costs to consider.
Consider firstly the yearly tax burden of the average US household which is roughly $19,000. Comparatively, it costs $23,876 a year to house, feed, and care for an inmate. To give more perspective most parents spend $7,000 per child on education and close to $9,000 in healthcare costs per person. In light of such numbers no one should be shocked to find out that we spent $44 Billion on corrections in 2007 alone.
A SYSTEM DIVIDED
To Be Black at Stuyvesant High
By FERNANDA SANTOS
Published: February 25, 2012
Voice of Rudi-Ann Miller
The New York Times
LIKE a city unto itself, Stuyvesant High School, in Lower Manhattan, is broken into neighborhoods, official and otherwise. The math department is on the 4th of its 10 floors; biology is on the 7th. Seniors congregate by the curved mint wall off the second-floor atrium, next to lockers that are such prime real estate that students trade them for $100 or more. Sophomores are relegated to the sixth floor.
In Stuyvesant slang, the hangouts are known as “bars.” Some years ago, the black students took over the radiators outside the fifth-floor cafeteria, and the place soon came to be known as the “chocolate bar,” lending it an air of legitimacy in the school’s labyrinth of cliques and turfs.
It did not last long. This year, Asian freshmen displaced the black students in a strength-in-numbers coup in which whispers of indignation were the sole expression of resistance. There was no point arguing, said Rudi-Ann Miller, a 17-year-old senior who came to New York from Jamaica and likes to style her hair in a bun, slick and straight, like the ballerina she once dreamed of becoming.
“The Asian kids, they’re just everywhere,” she said.
When the bell rings and the school’s 3,295 students spill out of classrooms into the maze of hallways, escalators and stairs like ants in a farm, blacks stand out because they are so rare. Rudi was one of 64 black students four years ago when she entered Stuyvesant, long considered New York City’s flagship public school. She is now one of 40.
Asians, on the other hand, make up 72.5 percent of Stuyvesant’s student body (they are 13.7 percent of the city’s overall public school population), a staggering increase from 1970, when they were 6 percent of Stuyvesant students, according to state enrollment statistics. Back then, white students made up 79 percent of Stuyvesant’s enrollment; this year, they are 24 percent, and 14.9 percent systemwide.
Hispanic students are 40.3 percent of the system. Currently, they make up 2.4 percent of Stuyvesant’s enrollment, while blacks, who make up 32 percent of the city’s public school students, are 1.2 percent.
New York City has eight specialized high schools whose admission is based entirely on the results of an entrance exam, a meritocratic system that does not consider race or ethnicity. The top score on the exam is 800. In recent years, the cutoff for Stuyvesant has been around 560; Rudi scored 594.
Earning a spot at Stuyvesant is unquestionably a badge of honor, sort of a secret knock to an exclusive club. As high school admissions decisions are revealed across the city in the coming week, many people are concerned that it is a club that black students — and, to a similar extent, Latinos — have an increasingly hard time cracking.
No one claims that the disparity is caused by overt discrimination. But in a school that is devised to attract the best of the best, parents and educators alike find the demographics troubling. It has become a question of perception as to who belongs.
The school’s parent coordinator, Harvey Blumm, said that when he visited middle schools whose enrollments were overwhelmingly black and Latino, it was not uncommon to find students who had never heard about the specialized high school exam; or to meet students who had signed up for the exam, but had never thought of taking a practice test or prep course — something common among white and Asian students; or to have guidance counselors tell him that Stuyvesant “isn’t for our kids.”
RUDI, who lives in the Wakefield section of the Bronx, attended sixth and seventh grades in Jamaica, and eighth grade in Mount Vernon, a Westchester County suburb. Her father, Donovan Miller, a director of accounting at Bronx Community College, recalled asking a colleague for advice about enrolling Rudi, the youngest of his three children, in “the best New York City high school.” The colleague advised Mr. Miller that he had to sign her up for the specialized high school exam and, if he wanted to improve her odds, to have her take some kind of test preparation program.
Many Stuyvesant students start preparing for the exam months, even years, in advance. There are after-school, weekend and summer classes run by large companies like Kaplan and Princeton Review, as well as by neighborhood outfits like Aim Academy, in the predominantly Chinese enclave of Flushing, Queens, and the Khan’s Tutorial branch in nearby Jackson Heights, home to thousands of families from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
Rudi took Kaplan’s 12-week program, which met on Saturdays at Fordham University, at a cost of $750, the summer after seventh grade. (Students take the exam in October of their eighth-grade year.) Her tutor, a Stuyvesant graduate, persuaded her to make the school her first choice.
Her mother, Annmarie Miller, a nursing assistant at a hospital in the Bronx, recalled a cousin’s reaction when she mentioned Rudi’s pick: “You have to be Chinese or Indian to get in there.” A co-worker, also black, “said the exam is built to exclude blacks because it’s heavy on math, and black people can’t do math,” Mrs. Miller said.
Rudi said she has never felt uncomfortable at Stuyvesant, but she has felt puzzled. She has been the only black person in most of her classes, and often goes hours without seeing another. The school’s attendance sheets have names and pictures of the students, and she said teachers were quick to learn who she is; there are few others like her, she said.
For Rudi, being black at Stuyvesant has been a journey of self-discovery. In Jamaica, as in parts of the Bronx, it is not skin color that distinguishes people, she said, but the car they drive, the neighborhood they live in or the job they have.
At school, she embraced her racial identity, becoming president last May of the Black Students League, the smallest of the school’s four diversity clubs, which usually draws fewer than 10 regulars to its weekly meetings. She had run unopposed.
Rudi said the league wasn’t “about black power or anything like that,” but to “make Stuy aware of our community and our culture.”
It has been a frustrating task.
As part of Black History Month, the league screened an hourlong documentary, “Slavery and the Law,” which chronicles the status of blacks from colonial times through the civil rights era. There were 100 chairs in front of the pull-down screen at Stuyvesant’s sixth-floor library; 15 students showed up.
“We’ve just never had the numbers to make it work,” Rudi lamented.
Rudi’s paternal grandfather arrived in America in 1968 and ultimately became a citizen. He paved the way for her parents, who arrived in 2006 to build their future — in a house in the suburbs at first, then just over the city line in a suburban-seeming slice of the Bronx, on a street of children-at-play signs and matching brick homes. Rudi stayed behind in Jamaica to finish seventh grade, on a government scholarship at Campion College, a school her father described as the best in Jamaica, with her sister, Nadia, who was finishing college. (They have an older brother, who still lives there.)
Rudi landed at Kennedy International Airport on July 4, 2007, to live her parents’ American dream. Nadia, who arrived a year later, gave modeling a try, and graduated from flight school before she discovered she was afraid of heights. Now she works at a bank and is considering medical school.
“Have you ever seen a doctor who’s unemployed?” Nadia, 25, asked their mother one night before dinner.
Rudi said, “My sister is definitely smarter than me.” Nadia said Rudi worked harder.
In January, a week before her midyear exams, Rudi e-mailed a friend, “I’m STRESSED and SLEEP DEPRIVED! In fact, I won’t be going to sleep tonight (second night in a row. ... Oh, well!)”
By then, she had already been accepted via early admission to Yale, her first choice. Nadia could not understand why Rudi did not just coast until graduation.
“I don’t want to be an embarrassment to my teachers,” Rudi said.
She has also had enough of the grumbling at Stuyvesant that black students do better in the college-admissions game because of their skin color.
YEAR after year, certain middle schools in New York — Mark Twain Gifted and Talented in Coney Island, Brooklyn, and the Christa McAuliffe Middle School in nearby Bensonhurst — send dozens of students to Stuyvesant, according to Mr. Blumm, the parent coordinator. (Last year, 112 students from Mark Twain and 85 from Christa McAuliffe enrolled at Stuyvesant, he said.) But years can go by without a single student from District 7, in a poor and heavily immigrant section of the South Bronx, earning admission.
Sometimes, Mr. Blumm said, blacks and Latinos who do well enough on the entrance exam to get into Stuyvesant are lured away by prestigious private high schools, which offer them full scholarships and none of the issues that even elite public schools have to contend with, like tight budgets and overcrowding. Last year, 11 black students enrolled. Eleanor Archie, an assistant principal who is black, said it was the fewest she can recall in her more than 20 years at Stuyvesant.
“That’s what we keep worrying about,” Ms. Archie said. “It keeps getting smaller and smaller.”
Opraha Miles, who was president of the Black Students League before her graduation from Stuyvesant in 2010, said she feared the club would disappear for lack of members and interest. She said she used to have to “hunt people down,” dragging them from the chocolate bar to the league’s meetings to ensure a quorum.
Ms. Miles, now 19 and a sophomore at Wesleyan University, remembered a discussion the league hosted when she was at Stuyvesant on the school’s demographics, during which an Asian boy said, she recalled, “Something to the effect that it wasn’t our fault, but that blacks aren’t smart enough; they don’t work hard enough” to get in.
“It still stings,” she said.
In a separate discussion about their dwindling ranks, Ms. Miles said, a black student suggested, “Why not go to the middle schools people like us attend and tell the kids about Stuyvesant?”
Stanley Teitel, the school principal, excused Ms. Miles and several others from class for a few hours so they could visit a school in Canarsie, Brooklyn, where the group spoke to an auditorium packed with sixth and seventh graders, fielding questions about what it was like to go to a school that was the stuff of legend, and if it was really that hard to get in.
The city does not track the race and ethnicity of students who take the specialized high school exam, only of those who receive offers from one of the schools, said a spokesman for the city’s Education Department. In 2010, 28,280 students took the test; 5,404 scored high enough to earn a slot. The department did not have race or ethnicity information for 979 of those with sufficiently high scores because they came from private schools or from outside the city, and questions of race and ethnicity are not part of the exam application. But of the remainder, 47 percent were Asian, 23 percent were white, 6 percent were Hispanic, and 5 percent were black, according to city records.
Over the years, there have been a host of efforts to increase the number of black and Latino students at Stuyvesant and the other large specialized high schools in the city, Bronx High School of Science and Brooklyn Technical High School, like making interviews and grade-point averages part of the admissions process. At Brooklyn Tech, 10 percent of the 5,332 students today are black — sizable in the realm of specialized high schools, but also a big drop from 1999-2000, when 24 percent were black. At Bronx Science, 3.5 percent of the 3,013 students are black, down from 9 percent in 1999-2000.
The number of blacks at Stuyvesant peaked in 1975, when they made up 12 percent of the school’s enrollment, or 303 of the school’s 2,536 students. In 1980, there were 212 black students; in 1990, 147; in 2000, 109; and in 2005, 66, state records show.
Lisa Mullins, who graduated from Stuyvesant in 1977 and is among the core members of its Black Alumni Association, suggested in an interview that the schools should automatically accept the valedictorian and salutatorian of every city middle school, an echo of the Texas program that grants admission to the state’s flagship public university to the top 10 percent of graduates of every high school. Last week, the United States Supreme Court agreed to hear a challenge to the Texas program from a white student who said she had been rejected because of her race.
Ms. Miles, for her part, said the city needed do a better job disseminating information about the test and the free preparatory programs available.
The city’s Education Department has been offering such a program, with weekend and summer coaching sessions to promising but disadvantaged sixth graders — and, this year only, seventh graders — for more than 20 years. Its original mission was to increase the number of blacks and Latinos, but after a legal challenge in 2007, income became its main eligibility criteria. Since then, however, the program has shrunk — 2,800 students attended in 2008, down from 3,800 two years before — and even among those who participated, black and Latino students were far less likely to take the entrance exam than Asians and whites. This year, Stuyvesant’s Black Alumni Association started offering a more modest version of the tutoring program, benefiting about 100 students. (How they fared will not be known until this week’s admissions letters are sent out.) The middle school visits by the Black Students League and others from Stuyvesant’s diversity clubs have become an annual tradition.
About 10 years ago, Stuyvesant opted out of a program established in the 1970s to give disadvantaged students with exam scores just below the cutoff level a chance to study over the summer and earn a slot at the school.
Mr. Teitel, the principal, declined to comment for this article, but explained his decision last year, at a forum that was held after a video by a group of white students rapping racist and otherwise offensive lyrics made its way to YouTube. He said that a change in Education Department policies meant he could take into the program only students who scored too low for admission to any of the city’s specialized schools, but not those who missed Stuyvesant’s cutoff and got in somewhere else.
That would have most likely meant that students in the target group would have tested 80 or 90 points below the lowest-scoring student Stuyvesant had admitted — a gap, he said, too wide for most of them to overcome.
“They would find it incredibly difficult to succeed,” Mr. Blumm, the parent coordinator, said in an interview.
ABOUT three-quarters of Stuyvesant’s students are immigrants or children of immigrants. Yet Ángel Colón, a portly Puerto Rican who serves as adviser to the schools’ diversity and community-service student groups, said he realized one day that there was a problem with the colorful brochures the black students brought to the middle schools they visited: “There wasn’t a black or brown face in the crowd,” he said.
Mr. Colón, 44, whose formal education ended upon graduation from high school in the Bronx, has turned his office, on the seventh floor at Stuyvesant, into a kind of refuge for the school’s gay, Latino and black students, drawing them partly with a generous supply of cookies and Rice Krispie Treats. The students seek him out for his simple wisdom — “You’ve got to be happy with who you are,” he might tell them — and his nonjudgmental ear.
A lot of black students, he said, have confided, “If I could do it all over again, I don’t know if I would have come here.”
“There’s something very isolating,” Mr. Colón said, “about being one of the very few.”
Rudi has never harbored regrets. There have been disappointing and enraging moments, she said, like when a good friend, the only black senior in Stuyvesant’s esteemed speech-and-debate team, was given a book on rap lyrics as a holiday gift from a white boy she had been mentoring.
Like many of her white and Asian classmates who make lengthy treks from the outer reaches of Brooklyn and Queens to Stuyvesant’s campus near the site of ground zero, Rudi begins each day before dawn. She sets the alarm on her cellphone for 5:30 a.m., and puts it at the edge of her bed so she has to get up to turn it off. At 6:15, she rouses her father, who drives her to the Wakefield/241st Street stop on the No. 2 train to Manhattan.
One recent morning on the train, she rested her head on an environmental science book as thick and heavy as an encyclopedia volume, squeezed on each side by strangers drinking coffee and nodding off. Blue earphones piped in Bob Marley and U2 tunes, her antidote against the rattle of the hourlong ride.
After exiting at Chambers Street, she quick-stepped west, then across a pedestrian bridge and into the exclusive club, book pressed against her chest like armor as she lost herself in a sea of arriving students. Hers was the only black face in sight.
via nytimes.com
What happened
when Chad found oil?:
"Quel Souvenir",
a new documentary
The objective of oil companies is not to be socially-responsible - that costs money; it is to make as much money as possible. It's the government's job to be socially-responsible, and to ensure that oil companies adhere to practices that don't harm anyone. This is often where the problem lies, but Chad was supposed to be different.
Chad, a landlocked country in north-central Africa, is one of the world's poorest nations; its HDI ranking is 7th from the bottom.
About 85% of its population works in agriculture. Oil was discovered in Chad in the 1960s, but political instability was a deterrent to investment, so the oil stayed where it was. That changed in 1999 when the World Bank proposed a plan that was supposed to be a test case for transparency and poverty-reduction in resource-rich developing countries. Put simply, the oil would be extracted profitably, proceeds would be shared equitably between the parties involved, the environment would be protected and most of the government's share of the profits would be spent on reducing poverty. And pigs would fly. This being a landlocked country you need, also, to somehow transport it to the nearest port for delivery to the world. So, the plan, a joint-venture between the World Bank, the Chadian government and an ExxonMobil-led consortium of oil production companies, agreed on the proposal for a 650-mile pipeline project running from Cameroon to the Gulf of Guinea.
This $4.2 billion Chad-Cameroon Oil Development and Pipeline Project is the largest private sector investment in sub-Saharan Africa, and is one of the most controversial World Bank Group projects in the institution’s history.
Local and international environmental and human rights NGOs and activists called for a two-year moratorium on the grounds that nobody was ready for it—not the government nor civil society nor the farmers who would be most affected. The project went ahead, anyway.
Chad 's first petroleum exports departed for the international market in October 2003. The forecast was for $2-$3 billion in revenues for Chad over next 25 years.
So, what happened when Chad found oil? Quite simply, the people it was meant to benefit the most got shafted. The government is coining it - so are the oil companies, of course - and the World Bank’s private sector lending arm, which is happily collecting on its $200 million commercial loan (although not the World Bank's public sector lending arms which withdrew from the project in 2008). Everyone else is wondering where all the money is going, particularly the displaced who lost more in land than they got in compensation. For the full story of this sorry story read the piece AlterNet published in December 2009; It's still very much up to date.
Quel Souvenir, a new film by Danya Abt, follows the pipeline through the many communities it touches, communities filled with people who ask ‘If the land is rich, why are we so poor?,’ and frames the project within a larger context of growing oil exploitation in Africa.
To find out how to arrange a screening or support the film, contact Danya at Danya.Abt@gmail.com
via thisisafrica.me
Blood and Fire:
Jamaica’s Political History
Jamaica is an island that has been shaped by rebellion. Historically black people in Jamaica have fought against colonial occupation more aggressively than any of Britain’s possessions. In fact it is believed that Jamaica had more runaway slaves than any other British colony. It was an innate desire for freedom and disgust of Babylon that spearheaded the fight towards Jamaican Independence in 1962. This was a moment of great pride in Jamaican history. However, despite at once being the fastest growing economy in the developing world, Jamaica (like most colonised States) has struggled to reach it’s optimum potential against a complex landscape of socio-economic issues. A significant proportion of these problems are linked to the history of slavery on the island and its legacy of racism and discrimination.
via blackacrylic.net